The quiet backlash has a venue now, and it's the children's reading rug

The update

Librarians across the U.S. are running "Avoiding AI" workshops that walk attendees through disabling AI features on their devices — turning off Apple Intelligence, Gemini, and email-summarizing tools. The format started with Hannah Cyrus at Bangor Public Library in Maine and spread after she published a journal article about it; dozens of librarians worldwide contacted her, including Charlie Bailey in South Philadelphia. Both report demand far beyond their usual programming.

By the numbers

Under the hood

Bailey's hour-long session opens with how chatbots actually work and why someone might use or skip them, then moves to step-by-step, on-projector instructions for the major platforms. Cyrus started the format because patrons kept asking why their devices were trying to write and summarize their emails. The mood in the room is communal — one attendee shared the trick of appending "&udm=14" to a Google Search to hide AI results, which Bailey wrote on the whiteboard. Attendees' objections ranged from data centers to environmental cost, though several drew a line: skeptical of consumer AI, not of AI for medical breakthroughs or document scanning.

The signal

The interesting signal here isn't that some people dislike AI — it's where the demand is coming from and how it's framed. Librarians are treating "how do I turn this off" as a digital-literacy question, not a Luddite one, and normal people are showing up in numbers that dwarf an Intro to Computers class. That's a referendum on forced adoption. When a feature has to be defaulted-on and buried in settings to get used, the workshop teaching people to find that setting is the market talking back.

The backstory

Cyrus frames forced device-level AI as possibly "the straw that's breaking the camel's back" — the culmination of a slow-building awareness that a handful of companies hold outsized influence over how people use their own tools. The workshops aren't anti-technology; librarians pointed to genuinely useful AI like optical character recognition for scanning old documents. The complaint is about agency and defaults, not capability.

Who it's for

Founders

→Signal that forced-on AI defaults breed resentment

Designers

→Case study in opt-out backlash

The catch

This is a handful of workshops covered in one report, not a measured national movement — viral Instagram engagement and full waitlists are real but small numbers. And the attendees themselves aren't rejecting AI wholesale, so reading this as a broad anti-AI verdict overstates it. It's more precisely a backlash against opt-out-by-default design.

What to watch

Watch whether the format keeps spreading through library networks now that Cyrus is fielding requests worldwide, and whether platform makers respond by making AI features easier to decline. The uncomfortable question for Apple, Google, and Microsoft: if a librarian's off-switch tutorial fills a room, why is the off switch so hard to find?